The
James family of Newport on the Isle of Wight was
sturdily Protestant in Elizabethan times and could boast three James of
prominence at that time:

Dr.
John James,
who was the Queen’s physician

Dr.
Thomas James, who was born in 1571 and said
to have been the son of Marian exiles.He
was an eminent scholar and in 1602 became the first
librarian of the
Bodleian Library in Oxford.

and
his
cousin Richard James who represented Newport in Parliament from 1597 to
1604.

James in Grosmont, Monmouthshire

The
James family of Grosmont in Monmouthshire near
the Herefordshire border dates back to the 17th century.Solicitors' records referred to a Philip
James and a William James having lands in Grosmont in 1688 and a Thomas
James
having tenancy of a house there in 1714.

The
house itself was a very old one,
some of it having been apparently built in the early part of the 16th
century.
Over the door was the date 1673 and on the door-frame of the stable
1671.

These
James held Town Farm in Grosmont from the early 1700’s until its sale
in 1860.

Phillip
Morgan's 2008 book A Grosmont
Miscellany recounted one
interesting James family titbit.Elizabeth James of this family had been
married to John Croft, but they had no children.When she died in 1796 she initially left all
her estate to her servant Eleanor
Jones.She later wrote a codicil
leaving sums of money to relatives and friends.The honest Eleanor discovered and revealed this codicil.

William James the Welsh Ploughboy Made Good

William
James was born in Pembrokeshire in the summer of
1720 to a poor Welsh miller.He ran away
to sea in 1732 and by the age of 18, was commanding a ship in the West
Indies
under Captain Hawke.It was during this
period that he was captured by the Spanish and when released, drifted
at sea
until being captured again in Cuba.

In
1747, at the age of 27, he joined the East India Company and was
appointed Commander
of Marine Forces to protect its trading ships. He sailed his gunship
the Protector to fight the Arab pirates on
their island fortress off the west coast of India.He was ultimately successful in his attack because
he had earlier taken soundings of the rocky coastline and was able to
get close
to the island using shallow boats.

In
1759, still only 39, he returned to England a rich man.He purchased the Park Farm estate at Eltham
in 1774 and was awarded a baronetcy in 1778.Fame and riches he had a-plenty.But on the day of his daughter’s wedding in 1783 he suffered a
stroke
and died.

Early James in
America

James

Birth

Death

John James

1623 Wales (Caernarvon)

1690 Stafford co, Virginia

William James

1639 unknown

1697 Newport, Rhode Island

James James

1650 Wales (Pembroke)

1708 Chester co, Pennsylvania

David James

1669 Wales (Radnor)

1739 Chester co, Pennsylvania

John James

1670 Wales (Pembroke)

1749 Montgomery co, Pennsylvania

Howell James

1684 Wales
(Monmouth)

1717 New Castle co, Delaware

The James Family of Bucks
County, Pennsylvania

The
James family of Bucks county was of Welsh
origin, being descended from John and Elizabeth James who with their
family
left their village in Pembrokeshire for America in 1711.They were Welsh Baptists and the vanguard of
a Baptist colony who eight years later would organize themselves into a
church
known as the Montgomery Baptist church in Montgomery county,
Pennsylvania.The James family were
members of this church
for many years.

Their son William, born
in Wales about 1692, appears to have been their favorite son.He moved to New Britain in Bucks county and
died there in 1778.His was the forebear
of most of the James family who settled there.Isaiah James of his family was a prominent member of the Bucks
county
Assembly in the 1830’s.

William James
and His Rebellious Son Henry

William
James, Scots Irish,
had come to Albany, New York penniless and in 1795 opened a dry goods
store
there.His roving eye soon saw business
opportunities elsewhere.He made a
fortune speculating in land along the newly opened Erie Canal and a
second
fortune by exploiting a new method of extracting salt.He died in 1832 a very rich man, some say the
second richest man of his time after John Jacob Astor.

His
son Henry James or HJ was the fifth of a generation of eleven children
which
abstained from business in what he called a “rupture with my
grandfather's
tradition and attitude.”He rebelled
against the moralistic prescriptions of his father’s stern Presbyterian
faith and
was forced to contest a punitive last will and testament in order to
obtain his
share of the estate.HJ also suffered in
his youth a serious accident which resulted in the
amputation of his leg below the knee.

HJ
used his inheritance to
follow his calling as a peripatetic Swedenborgian philosopher and
social controversialist.A friend of
notables such as Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, he was always on the move - between Albany
and Manhattan
and Albany, between America and Europe, and through a succession of
eccentric
family homes.These included homes in
Newport,
Cambridge, and Manhattan in America and more homes in Paris, London,
Geneva,
Boulogne, and Bonn in Europe.
HJ had
five illustrious children by his wife Mary:

William
James (WJ), the psychologist
and philosopher

Henry
James (HJ) the writer

Garth
Wilkinson James (known as
Wilky)

Robertson
James (or Bob)

and
Alice
James (AJ) the diarist.

The
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Jesse
James
was killed by Robert Ford in an ambush on April 3, 1882 at St. Joseph
in
Buchanan county, Missouri.

Jesse, Frank
and everyone around them knew that time had run out.As the inevitable drew closer, everyone was left
to grapple with their own self.In the
most clear, spare and simple images, Jesse can be seen with his family,
with
his cousins, and with his assassins.Jesse grew more lonely and alone.His star was burning out like a comet and everyone was going
down with
him.

Brad
Pitt played Jesse James in
this movie.He stripped away the
myth.He stripped away the legend and
the lore.He stripped away the western
and all its gratuitous violence.What he
left us with was the man himself, Jesse James.